The phenomenal growth of network-based electronic commerce has resulted in a multitude of new applications, including hosting, conducting and managing remote links and networks. These applications permit users to interact with each other in the course of transacting business or tracking information of interest using secure links.
Secure links or connections for obtaining secure access to a computing resource typically involve one or more of three concerns—authentication, authorization and accounting (“AAA”). The term secure, consequently, includes the ability to authenticate a party and/or encrypt communications to prevent eavesdropping by unintended recipients or third parties. A secure network is formed by communications over secure links. However it should be understood that there are various levels of authentication and encryption that are available and are intended to be within the scope of the invention. A plain text communication without authentication is an insecure communication although the context dictates the threshold to be used when deciding whether a communication is secure.
In a commercial context it is important to authenticate a user, then authorize access to resources for the authenticated user and to account for the use of such resources. The “roaming user” made possible by mobile computing, and in particular wireless links, makes the AAA task increasingly challenging. In this context security protocols need to accommodate wireless links and decentralized operations. Significant latency may be encountered in a network access to a Personal Area Network (PAN), Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN). However, the intrinsically transient nature of interactions with mobile computing units requires low latency connections to provide an acceptable computing experience to users. In particular, users should be able to rapidly establish connections on secure links regardless of whether the access point exists within an intranet or on an externally located dynamically established link. Novice users or new employees should be able to obtain at least limited privileges to use a secure network. Many problems, such as those outlined above remain in implementing secure links that utilize advanced network access control and encryption/authentication schemes or flexible conference topologies. These problems present new challenges in the area of network server systems supporting wireless networking.